Buffy Sainte-Marie (born February 20, 1941) is a Native Canadian singer-songwriter, musician, composer, visual artist, educator, pacifist, and social activist. Throughout her career in all of these areas, her work has focused on issues of Indigenous peoples of the Americas. Her singing and writing repertoire also includes subjects of love, war, religion, and mysticism. In 1997 she founded the Cradleboard Teaching Project, an educational curriculum devoted to better understanding Native Americans. She has won recognition and many awards and honours for both her music and her work in education and social activism. (More from Wikipedia)
The first Native American artist that I became familiar with is Buffy Sainte-Marie (Cree). Hers is one of the strongest vibratos that I have ever heard in a singer, and I think it is fair to say that her music is an acquired taste. I have several of her albums, but I can recommend the above double-LP as providing a good overview of her music. She is primarily a folksinger but has also made rock and country recordings. Surprisingly, one of the four album sides on The Best of Buffy Sainte-Marie has electronic music; one song in particular is a lively rendition of a song by Leonard Cohen called “God is Alive (Magic is Afoot)”, with looping lyrics that freely interchange the ideas of “God” and “magic”.
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Buffy Sainte-Marie’s first album, It’s My Way! (1964) is described by William Ruhlmann for Allmusic as “one of the most scathing topical folk albums ever made. . . . Even decades later, the album’s power is moving and disturbing.” Buffy is pictured on the front cover with a mouthbow (also known as a musical bow), a musical instrument that she uses on several songs on her first few albums. Mouthbows appear in cave paintings that have been dated to 15,000 B.C., and this use might even precede the use of bows as weapons.
The opening track, “Now that the Buffalo’s Gone” is one of the most effective protest songs I have ever heard. By the mid-1960’s, the “cowboys vs. Indians” dynamic in decades of Hollywood and television Westerns had been replaced by a growing appreciation for the nobility and dignity of Native Americans. In some quarters, it had become chic to claim some Indian ancestry, even in “polite society”. “Now that the Buffalo’s Gone” is basically a plea by Buffy Sainte-Marie to those people to help Native Americans who were still struggling. The song’s lyrics demonstrate clearly that Native Americans were treated much worse in defeat than Germany was, and also that land grabs and broken promises were not merely centuries-old history but were still occurring today – dramatically and poignantly ending with the lyrics: “It’s here and it’s now / You can help us dear man / Now that the buffalo’s gone”.
Some of the historically inaccurate lyrics have been corrected over the years, and other changes reflect more contemporary matters; for example, “A treaty forever George Washington signed” is a reference to a treaty that was actually signed by Washington’s agent Timothy Pickering – that lyric is now: “A treaty forever your Senators signed”. On Buffy Sainte-Marie’s website, she says of “Now that the Buffalo’s Gone”: “This song was on my first album and I’d have thought it would be obsolete by now. But governments are still breaking promises and stealing indigenous lands, and I still believe that informed people can help make things better.”
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Like many of Bob Dylan’s protest songs, another song on It’s My Way!, “Universal Soldier” has a different target from what one might expect. Rather than railing at politicians and tyrants, Buffy Sainte-Marie points out that ultimately, the common soldiers are the ones doing the fighting: “He’s the Universal Soldier and he really is to blame”. “Universal Soldier” was an early hit for Donovan.
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Yet another song on Buffy Sainte-Marie’s album It’s My Way!, “Cod’ine” – adapted from codeine, a compound often found in cough syrup, but pronounced “co-dyne” – is one of the first songs to deal with the dangers of drug use. The song “Cod’ine” is among those included on the above album, This is Janis Joplin 1965 that I was not previously familiar with; another track is an early version of her composition “Turtle Blues” that appears on the classic 1968 Big Brother and the Holding Company album, Cheap Thrills. This album collects several songs that were originally recorded by Janis Joplin and her guitar; her bandmate in BB&HC, James Gurley added a full band to the tracks, and the album was released 30 years later, in 1995.
On the box set Nuggets: Original Artyfacts from the First Psychedelic Era is another version of “Cod’ine” by a psychedelic rock band called the Charlatans; they are considered by many critics to be one of the earliest bands to play in what was later called the San Francisco Sound. Formed in the summer of 1964, the band auditioned for Autumn Records in September 1965 and was later signed by Kama Sutra Records in early 1966. The Charlatans wanted to release “Cod’ine” as their first single, but Kama Sutra officials vetoed the idea because of its drug connotations, even though the song did not at all promote drug use. The Charlatans’ version of “Cod’ine” was later used in the soundtrack of the 1999 Hilary Swank film, Boys Don’t Cry.
The Charlatans’ second drummer was Dan Hicks, who later formed the band Dan Hicks and His Hot Licks. In the late 1970’s, Charlatans founding member Mike Wilhelm joined the Flamin’ Groovies as their lead guitarist for 6 years.
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I was scanning the song list on It’s My Way! and spotted another song that came up in a different context: “You’re Going to Need Somebody on Your Bond”. As with every song on It’s My Way! but one, the songwriter was listed as Buffy Sainte-Marie on the Allmusic listing for the album. I actually said out loud when I saw that: “Really?!” – where I remembered it was on the most recent album by the psychedelic hard rock band the Deviants, Dr. Crow.
I don’t remember thinking consciously that “You’re Gonna Need Somebody on Your Bond” – the way the song was shown on the Deviants album – didn’t sound like a song that Buffy Sainte-Marie would have written, but it really didn’t. For that matter, it didn’t sound like a song that the Deviants would have written either.
I will have more to say about songwriting in a post sometime in the future, but generally speaking, the music industry has become much more fastidious about songwriting credits now than was the case through the 1960’s. Regarding “You’re Going to Need Somebody on Your Bond”, which is a song that is evidently in the Public Domain, it was fairly common for musicians to list themselves as the songwriters. The more proper credit would be: “Traditional – arranged by Buffy Sainte-Marie”.
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The music on Broken Treaties is basically soft rock; much of the music has lush strings, so Silverbird is often classified as a disco band, even though 1971-1973 is early in the disco era to say the least. However, there are a variety of musical styles and several lead vocalists; and overall, the music has a definite tribal feel. Their voices merge beautifully, providing fine background vocals; on “Would You” and “Poor Boy”, the lead vocals are several singers in harmony.
The opening tracks on each side – “Custer’s Last Stand” and the title song, “Broken Treaties” – deal effectively (and far less provocatively than Buffy Sainte-Marie did on It’s My Way!) with the basics regarding Native Americans; besides the themes that are obvious from the song titles, the songs talk about the slaughter of the buffalo herds and the current poverty among Native Americans. The mood of these two songs is appropriately somber, though the majority of the songs on Broken Treaties are upbeat.
(August 2013)
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Items: Buffy Sainte-Marie
